Got a project you're dying to raise crowd-sourced money for, but not sure how much to shoot for? Here's a hint: calculate how many of your friends and close contacts could give an upper-tier amount, then divide it by five. That's your starting point.

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Sarah Gilbert, writing for the Get Rich Slowly blog, details the nuts and bolts of getting together $8,000 for a literary magazine aimed at parents. There's some of the general psychology and marketing talk you'd expect—being your own best cheerleader, choosing smart rewards—but also some helpful thumbnail accounting advice on goals and money. Here's Gilbert's system for figuring out the true minimum of what you can raise:

Guess at the monetary size of your friend base. You'll need at least five times the amount you're shooting for in "capacity." I thought of many friends who could afford the higher contributions - say, $100 to $1000 each. Only about 10% of those who I thought could give at these high levels did (while many gave at lower levels, many didn't give at all). This could be anything from simply not being on social media during your campaign, to a reluctance to give money to relatives, to a distrust of the online payment process. About 1/5th of my Facebook friends gave.